Continuing the series of posts from my new book SPLASH!

From Chapter 5:

This is the third Founding Father of “Swimming 2.0” — George Gordon, a.k.a. Lord Byron, shown here recovering after swimming the Hellespont in 1810. Both the most famous poet and most famous swimmer of the first half of the 19th century, Byron put the whimsy into waves, the panache into plunges. (The 1831 painting is by Sir William Allan.)